reach out to me

The first article in this 3-part series discussed the invisible wind of workplace privilege and a series of questions young men should ask themselves to identify ways they may receive preferential treatment at work. This article is focused on the importance of young men unearthing their implicit biases (X-minute read)

Tactic #2: Explore Your Implicit Biases

As mentioned in the first article, exploring the ways in which your own organization is biased is a solid first step toward building awareness of gender inequality, but it is not the only step. Of all of the statistics I’ve seen related to gender inequality, the most interesting one is focused not on the pay gap or hiring biases, but on the mushy gray stuff between men’s ears.

In a sample of 4,000 men polled in the United Kingdom, 9 out of 10 of them want the women in their lives to have equality of opportunity with men and 7 out of 10 of them “believed that a more equal society between men and women would be better for the economy.” What these polls indicate is that the majority of men state explicitly that they want and support gender equality. This reality isn’t just true in the United Kingdom. There are millions of well-meaning men in the United States, both young and old, who I imagine would say the same thing. The percentage of people who would out themselves as explicitly sexist is a small minority.

So if it seems like the mass majority of men support gender and workplace equality, then why are the high-level statistics still so problematic? One answer is implicit bias.

The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University defines implicit biases as, “the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.” Implicit biases often contradict a person’s stated beliefs and values and every human being has them. These biases deeply affect our interpersonal and workplace interactions.

For instance, as men, we learn and are taught numerous beliefs about our role in the workforce that may bias us. The young men I worked with at Venture for America identified many of them in our conversations, including men being viewed as more technically savvy, less prone to emotionally erratic decision-making, and more prone to being interpreted as the primary breadwinner.

These biases are widespread in American society and can have a real effect on the workforce. Project Implicit, a Harvard-led, international research collaboration with a mission of educating the public on hidden biases, shows that implicit biases have a predictive quality on a macro level. They say that, “while a single [bias test] is unlikely to be a good predictor of a single person’s behavior at a single time point, across many people the [bias test] does predict behavior in areas such as discrimination in hiring and promotion.”

These implicit biases aren’t just present in people in their mid-late careers, the Don Draper-esque dinosaurs of the working world who are close to retirement age. When I took Project Implicit’s test on implicit associations between gender and career, for instance, I (29 years young) joined 24% of the population who demonstrated a strong implicit bias toward linking men and career and women with family.

My scores were likely influenced by my father’s role as primary breadwinner and my mother’s role as primary caretaker as well as growing up in the white-picket-fence conservative suburbs of a city in the South where traditional gender roles were strongly enforced.

I’m not alone as a millennial man demonstrating implicit bias. A 2014 Harvard Business School survey showed that “3 out of 4 millennial women anticipated their career would be at least as important as their partners’, while half (1 out of 2) of the men expected that their own careers would take priority. Likewise, less than half of the women MBA graduates believed they would handle most of the child care, while two-thirds of their male peers believed their wives would do so” (emphasis mine).

Young men entering the workforce, like all people, aren’t free from bias. These biases don’t make us inherently bad people, but being blind to them is a real risk-factor for perpetuating workplace inequality.

Facing Your Implicit Bias

After taking it, you can ask yourself, “In what ways might my experiences growing up affect the ways that I perceive gender in the workplace? Who was my primary caretaker? Did my primary caretaker work? Which occupations were men dominant in, and which women? Did I see women in executive leadership positions? Were there representations of female leaders or managers in the media I read or watched?”

There are additional proven tactics to counter your implicit biases. One tactic, suggested by Project Implicit, is “ensuring that implicit biases don’t leak out in the first place.” If you’re participating in the hiring process, for instance, “you can ‘blind’ yourself from learning a person’s gender or race when you’re making a decision about them by having their name removed from the top of a resume” during review.”

Another strategy Project Implicit suggests is to “compensate for your implicit preferences.” For example, if you find yourself connecting only to the other men in your workplace, you can go beyond your comfort zone and befriend women in your organization. Research shows that knowing others’ personal stories increases empathy and might increase awareness in a male colleague who had trouble understanding the struggles women or minorities face at work.

The last suggestion that Project Implicit has for fighting biases is changing, “what gets into [your] mind in the first place… This could mean going out of your way to watch television programs and movies that portray women and minority groups in positive or counter-stereotypical ways.” Media plays a profound role in bias creation and being aware of the effects of it is important to shifting potentially harmful beliefs.

In the Next Article…

In the final article in this series, we’ll focus on complex beliefs held by young men, especially young white men, that may prevent them from being advocates for gender equality.

My next door cube-mate was a woman in her late-20’s. I’ll call her Frances for the purpose of this essay. She’d earned a degree from a prestigious 4-year college and had a half-decade of experience in the sector we worked in. All of this made her job title very confusing.

“Frances!”, yelled our boss, Steve, as he barged in through the office door and stomped over to the cubicle next to mine like King-Kong in a button-down shirt. “I have some slides for the conference tomorrow. The content is solid but they need some formatting.”

Some formatting was an understatement. I’d seen these slides before. They were crammed with so many distorted images and run-on sentences that without extensive editing, an audience member might wonder whether our company were real or a complicated embezzlement scheme.

Steve said, “I need you to fix ‘em. Can you do it before tomorrow?”

“Sure thing, Steve,” Frances replied.

“Great. Knew I could count on you.” He stomped backed out of the room.

Frances was in her cubicle late that night. I saw her methodically replacing fuzzy pictures with sharp ones, removing unnecessary commas, and tweaking the formatting. It wasn’t work at a level commensurate with her experience, but it fit nicely under the title Steve gave her: Intern.

That same night, I pounded away on a new strategy for one of Steve’s projects. I was a recent college grad with few relevant work experiences, but my job description didn’t include any of the dirty work.

Frances and I talked about it sometimes. “Before this job, I had one kinda like yours,” she would say. “I wonder why Steve hasn’t asked me to work on more of your projects.” I never asked myself how Steve allocated work, but another co-worker of ours, Linda, had a theory that she divulged over lunch one day.

“Steve’s a sexist,” she told me in a blunt monotone, her brown eyes shooting lasers into my forehead as if the truth were as obvious as the sky is blue.

Linda had worked in the cubicle adjacent to mine for almost a year. She was an accomplished professional already, with a decade of experience and a Masters degree. But when our company won a shiny new project, Steve (also her boss) dumped it on my desk.

“Make me look good, Nelson,” he told me.

Linda continued, “If he weren’t a sexist, why else do you think you got to manage the project? No offense to you or anything, but you don’t have any professional experience. You’re a baby.”

I nodded sympathetically in response to her, but my internal monologue started spinning.

… You’re just jealous, I said to myself, retreating into an emotional shell like a threatened gastropod. …The project fits squarely into my role. That’s ridiculous.

But Lisa’s question stuck with me long after we left the table that afternoon. Why did I get to manage the project over her? Why didn’t I start out as an intern like Frances did? I certainly wasn’t more qualified than either of them. What was actually going on?

The Invisible Wind

When the Sociologist Michael Kimmel writes about male workplace advantages, he says it’s like having an invisible wind at your back. He says, “we rarely, if ever, get a chance to see how we are sustained, supported, and even propelled by that wind.” The implication is that things seem just a little easier than they should be, like the friction that’s supposed to be there has disappeared in a wondrous miracle of physics. I’m no physicist, but even I could identify little resistance to my advancement at this job.

Back then, I believed Steve gave me all of the important work because I understood what he demanded and did just that. But this reasoning wasn’t universalizable. Frances and Linda cranked out high-quality work too, but they encountered a headwind.

This early work experience gave me some anecdotal insight when I later researched why America’s labor inequality between men and women was as bad as it is. Preferential treatment by male bosses toward men is one of the many reasons why women comprise 47% of the labor force but only 26% of private-sector executive positions and 5% of Fortune 500 CEO’s. Hiring discrimination is common and can drastically alter women’s career trajectories. Payscale, a compensation research firm, wrote a study showing that bosses who share the same gender as their direct reports are more likely to give them more responsibility, and as a result, those employees get promoted more often.

When reflecting on my experiences, I’m struck by the ways in which they were representative of larger American labor equality issues. It also hits me how unaware I was of what was going on. I didn’t even think of myself as the beneficiary of inequality, much less a posterchild for America’s gender equality battles.

My obliviousness isn’t unique. There will be tens of thousands of young men like me entering the workforce every year, similarly unaware. In an age when American women are pushing powerfully for equality in the workforce, it’s a problem for young men to enter workplaces without awareness of the gendered power dynamics at play there.

Since founding a men’s group dedicated to discussing issues of gender inequality and building better and more inclusive workplaces, I’ve worked with dozens of young men around the country to remove this “awareness gap,” a blind spot that I believe is preventing men from being stronger advocates for gender workplace equality.

You may be saying to yourself, “Awareness? We don’t need men to be aware, we need them to act!” I agree. Awareness is no substitute for action. The reason why I’m writing about awareness, however, is that there are so many valuable resources already that are focused on specific actions that men can take to make the workplace more equitable for women. These resources include reducing bias in hiring, creating equitable and flexible work-life policies, advocating for companies to build inclusive infrastructure like lactation rooms for new moms, creating an inclusive culture with gender-neutral social outings, and assessing whether your company has a gender-based pay gap and removing it. There are relatively fewer resources that focus on building the necessary awareness so that working men make these aforementioned actions a high priority in their day-to-day.

You may also say to yourself, “What if someone identifies as a black or Latino man, or a transgender or gay man? Being a man doesn’t automatically mean someone is free from issues of workplace inequality or that I don’t experience discrimination and bias in other aspects of my identity.” This is 100% true. Identities intersect and people have written extraordinary pieces about being, for instance, in the gender majority and the racial minority at the same time. “Young men” is a broad category that has the potential to erase those distinctions, and yet I still think there are certain levels of privileges largely shared by people who are male-identifying that this series of three articles will delve into.

Okay! Let’s dive in, to the ways that men, especially young men, can investigate and reflect on the ways in which gender inequality manifests in their workplaces.

Tactic #1: Discuss Your Workplace

The men’s group I led was a part of Venture For America (VFA), an entrepreneurial training and apprenticeship Fellowship program of which I’m both an alum and former team member. Every year, over 150 recent college graduates join Venture For America to begin their career in entrepreneurship, and of the Fellows, around 50% are men. Over the past two years, we’ve led or hosted discussions during our 4+ week preparatory bootcamp about healthy masculinity in the startup world with these young men. This year, we also set up an online webinar after they started their jobs that was focused on building awareness of gender inequality in their workplaces.

I kicked off the webinar discussing my experience with Steve and asked the young men, “in what ways do you see or have you seen gender inequality manifest in your workplace?” When people started talking, stories arose that sounded far too familiar: The all-male software development team… The all-male executive team… A male employee referring to a woman he knew as a “fat bitch” in a public space where female coworkers could hear him… Male managers stating their preference for “strong employees” who could focus solely on work instead of “outside commitments,” like family.

The second question I asked them was, “what do you gain from gender inequality at your job?” One participant mentioned not having to worry about code switching because the dominant workplace culture talked about subjects like sports and beer. He also mentioned not having to worry about being the target of sexual misconduct in his workplace. Another said how he believes his deep, loud voice is more readily listened to. He also stated that, “My mistakes are more easily forgiven and co-workers don’t question my authority even though I’m entry-level.”

Asking reflective questions like these are essential for young men entering the workforce because they provide a space where they can reflect and digest layers of unearned advantage they may be experiencing. It’s a similar exercise to Peggy Macintosh’s Invisible Knapsack. Whereas she identifies, “the daily effects of white privilege in my life… [which] my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances…cannot count on,” the questions young men should be discussing focus on revealing privileges related to gender and work.

Young men should be guiding themselves through exercises like these at every workplace in the United States. The objective isn’t to guilt them or humiliate them, to say they’re bad people, or even to convince them that the preferential treatment they might be experiencing is only experienced by men. The main reasons are twofold.

If young men build awareness of the systemic gender inequality they benefit from early on in their careers, it raises the likelihood that as they rise in the workforce, they won’t unconsciously replicate past behaviors. Research has shown that biased behaviors “can be caught” like a disease and transmitted from person to person, generation to generation. Behavior in the workplace is no exception.

Research also says that awareness of biased behavior and discussion about it are two of the best ways to prevent it from being caught and spreading. Most young men I’ve worked with don’t want to unconsciously catch and be vessels for this intergenerational disease, and mention this as one of the reasons they participate in men’s groups. In acknowledging, exploring, and discussing these issues, these folks are much less at risk of perpetuating workplace inequalities than those who are not doing the work.

The second reason is that by identifying their own unearned advantage, young men can identify which benefits they receive that others don’t. From my own personal experience and talking with other men who have done similar exercises, awareness of these realities often leads to a deep desire to change things in the name of equality and fairness. It is a powerful foundation that can lead to action.

In the Next Article…

In the next article, we’ll focus on the ways in which workplace gender inequality manifests through the unconscious, exploring a phenomenon called Implicit Bias.